Search for escape artist leads to Edwardian Ball

The costumes are never uninteresting, as seen in this file photo from the 2011 Edwardian Ball.

Photo: Neil Girling

Hundreds of revelers squeezed themselves into heavily boned corsets and balanced top hats over heavily greased hair. They patiently waited in the January cold outside the Regency Ballroom on Friday night, handing over tickets to the party inside one by one. Some glowed with ghostly illuminated costumes or eerie lanterns. Their aesthetic blended Dickens-era London, vintage carnival, steampunk, Edward Gorey, vampires and burlesque all at once, but somehow it worked.

I ducked inside through the media side entrance, embarrassed by my dress from a Gap sale rack. The Edwardian Ball was under way — and I was underdressed.

I’d arrived early, intent on grabbing an opportunity to meet one of the night’s performers. LadyBeast is a New Orleans escape artist, and no matter where I searched for her among the mazelike space inside the ball, she managed to escape from me. My failed quest to find LadyBeast did, however, offer me a means of exploring all four floors of the Regency, transformed for the two-day Edwardian extravaganza. Friday night was an interactive circus-themed “World’s Fair,” featuring cabaret and acrobatic acts, an oddities museum, absinthe bars, fortune tellers, face painters, carnival games and live performances. Saturday was the official ball, very similar to the “World’s Fair,” but this time, far more dedicated to live music and dancing.

There was no sign of LadyBeast, who, I’d been informed, was “wearing gold.” Thousands of people were packed into the Regency Ballroom, and just about everyone had something golden attached to them, from gold-rimmed steampunk goggles to gold-dusted feather headdresses. “Excuse me, do you know where the escape artist is?” I asked anyone who looked like they might know the whereabouts of an escape artist. “I hear she’s in gold.”

As a result of my quest, I met a ton of Edwardian enthusiasts, and even ran into an old friend. Cheryl Cain and I knew each other as nerdy San Francisco teenagers, and even back then, she was into what Cain calls “historical re-enactment and entertaining oddities.” Cain met her fiance, Seth Ford, at an event similar to the Edwardian Ball — a soiree called the Gaskell Ball that’s held in the East Bay. The pair, who attend about a dozen of these events a year, is a match made in heaven.

“We’ve found that without doing a certain amount of these per year,” Ford said, “our quality of life goes down. We skipped a month and actually felt blue.”

Cain and Ford are eager participants of a community of people who collect and curate elaborate costumes and then wear them to really theatrical parties.

“No one’s a costume snob,” Cain said, before confiding that it’s totally historically inaccurate to wear a corset on the outside of one’s clothing. But there’s an element of mischievous sexiness to the Edwardian Ball that welcomes both underwear on the outside — and pure creativity. It also welcomes children of all ages. A handful of costumed kids made the rounds with their parents, just as wide-eyed at the whole affair as I was.

On the top floor of the Regency, above the large-scale revelry on the main floor and the VIP balcony overlooking it all, a smaller, darker ballroom hosted cabaret shows and intense artwork. Red glowing neon signs from businesses on Van Ness Avenue peeked through the windows. If one looked outside from just the right angle, an aggressive BevMo sign shone in stark contrast to the Edison bulbs and red velvet fainting couches inside. Much like a casino, it was easy to forget the outside world from within the experientially lush Edwardian Ball.

Four-dollar Diet Coke in hand, I made my way down one of the winding stairwells to the Regency’s basement level, a two-room vendor showcase in which craftspeople and artisans sold everything one might want to wear to the Edwardian Ball, Burning Man or any of the other costumed annual events attended by this creative community. By the time I returned to the balcony viewing area, someone named Beautiful Jean had gifted me a feathered hairpiece. “So you’ll fit in,” she smiled as she pinned the feathers to my hair.

Late into my evening, I collapsed into a chair in the rather empty VIP section and looked down onto the beautiful ballroom below. There she was! LadyBeast was hanging upside-down from the ceiling stage, squirming in a straight jacket. Within seconds, she’d wriggled free and dangled that white canvas jacket beneath her, whipping it from side to side. The crowd went wild. She’d escaped. LadyBeast was free.

Beth Spotswood is a San Francisco native who grew up in Marin County and returned to San Francisco after college in the East. She spent four years as a backstage dresser for “Steve Silver’s Beach Blanket Babylon” before signing on as a website producer for KPIX.

Spotswood’s work has been featured on KPIX, SFist, San Francisco Magazine, 7x7 Magazine, Porchlight Storytelling Series, LitQuake, Muni Diaries and the Bold Italic. She was the 2011 Reader’s Choice for 7x7 Magazine’s Hot 20 Under 40 and completed classes at Second City Training Center in Chicago. A Mission District resident for 15 years, Beth lives with her husband and a cat named Pompey.